


June 7

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Briefest mention of child abuse, Briefest mention of suicide, Depression, Existential Angst, Gen, Reincarnation, Too much angst probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-20
Updated: 2013-09-20
Packaged: 2017-12-27 03:57:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/974040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It wasn't a great life, but it was liveable.  Grantaire had learned to be content with liveable."</p>
<p>Modern AU (could be read as reincarnation) where Grantaire never meets Enjolras.  He may be better off this way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	June 7

It wasn't a great life, but it was liveable. Grantaire had learned to be content with liveable.

There had been a time that the very fact of his existence had him trembling, because he was here, and one day he wouldn't be and no matter what happened in the in between it would be over then and none of it would have meant anything. Or if it had, even if he managed to do something so big, so beautiful or important or selfless, that it endured after him, it still wouldn't make any difference to him because he would be gone (and that word was somehow bigger, scarier than “dead” because “dead” was still there, just in a different state, but gone was just absolutely flat-out fucking nothing) and wouldn't know. And in time even the people who remembered that big thing he'd done, they'd be gone too, and eventually all the people who remembered anything would be gone and the universe would go on without them, miles on miles of cold, empty space and huge flaming stars and nothing would have ever meant anything.

And it didn't help that no matter how much the people who thought things mattered tried to make a difference, even their best efforts never did any good. There were just too many openly shitty people out there. (And who was to say that the “good” people were really any less shitty, deep inside? Everybody was looking for something for themselves, whether it was a pat on the head or to duck out of a punishment.) People talked and made laws and collected contributions and the only changes that ever seemed to happen were the bad ones. You woke up and found out that hundreds of priests had been abusing little boys, backing up their commands to silence in the name of God. Or that war had broken out on a little scrap of land because people prayed to God in slightly different ways. Or that an earthquake had sent a tidal wave over millions of people, drowning them in their own houses.

Small wonder then that he found it difficult to care about things like “breakfast” or “electric bill.”

But all that—the days of panic attacks in the middle of a Wal-Mart, of silence and an empty apartment at 4 a.m., of weekends remembered only as a blur with details sketched in based on the bottles in the trash—was behind Grantaire now. He'd discovered the secret to getting by, and the secret was itself a big and terrible Truth that he held in the back of his mind and avoided gazing directly at for too long. The secret was this: You had to pretend not to know. Yes, the world was a terrible place where everything was meaningless and nothing anyone did made any real difference, and yes, one day you would die and that was it, end of story, lights out—it was all true, but the only way to live with that knowledge was to pretend you had no idea. It didn't make any of it any less true, and it didn't add any meaning to your existence. But it was more comfortable than spiraling into insanity in the face of everything—and it wasn't any more meaningless.

He had stopped painting. Early on in the time when things had started getting better, Grantaire had become aware of the connection between his bad days and the times when he had been doing art. At first—still flirting with the idea that maybe, if he faced everything head-on without flinching, he'd be able to make some sense out of it—he'd tried to use painting as a way of exploring some of this stuff. That strategy sent him down a several-week spiral that ended with him in the hospital for alcohol poisoning and too foggy a memory of the past week to able to say for certain whether it had been accidental.

After that, he tried to paint therapeutic things, focusing on the ideas and objects that didn't make him want to rip his brain out just to get it to stop thinking, but he found that those paintings never satisfied him. The roiling blackness inside him filled him so completely, occupied so much of his mind, that anything else seemed unimportant and fake beside it. And the feeling that his paintings were dishonest—even if they were technically very good—was so frustrating that it negated any benefit he was getting from continuing to do art.

And so he quit. Dropped out of art school (after three semesters of missed classes, late projects, and bombed finals, he was well on the road to flunking out anyway) and got a job as a barrista in a little indie coffee shop where there were interesting people for distractions. He threw out his paints along with his vodka bottles and pushed himself into a new pattern of living. 

He missed the art, the feeling of creating something new and unique, the pride he felt looking at a piece he'd made that worked, the technical challenge of getting the paint to do what he saw it doing in his head. He even missed the failures where he'd attempted something that was too hard or too weird or just a downright dumb idea. It wasn't a small price to pay, not even in exchange for an approximation of a functional life. It was, in fact, a very large price. But he was willing to pay it.

At least this way he had more time. As he clawed his way back to normalcy, Grantaire found himself with evenings off and nothing to fill them. He took up some hobbies, found them uncompelling, and set them back down again. Music was too close to painting for comfort. Reading made his head ache. Running was good; physical exhaustion pushed all thoughts out of his head, and the slowly increasing numbers in his phone's run log were progress he could watch and be proud of (even if it was—like everything else—pointless progress). Running was also boring.

It was cooking, of all things, that clicked for him. A plate of salad topped with almonds and orange-glazed chicken and sesame-ginger dressing didn't mean anything, but crafting it was a pleasure (one that held just the faintest echo of getting the paint to do what he wanted it to on the paper), and eating it afterward, even more of a pleasure. It was funny—so many months devoted to drinking, and he'd barely given a thought to eating. He made up for it now, buying ingredients he couldn't have pronounced six months ago, much less known how to use, experimenting with different varieties of rice, eating steak everywhere on the spectrum between raw and burned until he finally figured out how to get the grill to do what he wanted to it. 

When the month came when he spent more on ingredients and cookbooks and good knives than he had earned, he sat and stared at the bank statement openmouthed for a minute. It felt . . . good to see there in ink the real, financial evidence that something mattered to him. Ever since he'd made his change, he'd been slowly but steadily acruing an actual positive balance in the account, something he'd never had before. He put the extra in his savings each month because that was what you did, it was what responsible people do. It had never occurred to him that he might one day have a reason to want to spend it again.

He also dated, a bit. After a year sober, he cautiously let himself go back to bars. At some of them, he met guys, and a few of the guys liked him and he liked a few of them. Sometimes they came back to his place; sometimes he went to theirs. Sometimes they talked for a while at the bar and then said goodnight without anyone going back to anyone place. For a very few of them (only after they'd been in his life for several weeks), Grantaire cooked.

The darkness was still there—all the questions without answers, all the answers that he didn't want to know. He hadn't forgotten about any of it. He was still aware that everything was meaningless, if he thought about any of it too hard, and at the end he would be dead and none of it would matter then. But in the meantime he had figured out a way to function and even enjoy himself a little. He had learned to live with the fear, and he had accepted that living with it was as good as he was going to get. So while it wasn't a life he would call actually good, it was at least good in comparison to the alternative.

* * *

He dreamed of dust and noise and the smell of iron. It was a strange, disordered dream, like a fever dream, and in it he wandered through broken streets and splintered houses. There were brief glimpses of people, shouting or singing or crying, with mouths wider than they should be. There was smoke and the color red.

Then everything was silence and the light of morning shining on a floor littered with shards of wood and scraps of plaster. There was a hand in his, strangely warm in the cold morning air. The fingers that gripped his were sticky.

For a moment, blackness. And then he woke up.

* * *

The feeling of the dream stuck with Grantaire as he got up; brushed his teeth; dragged a comb through his tangled hair. Already, most of the details had faded away—he remembered there was something about holding someone's hand, and had something bad happened? He splashed cold water on his face and tried to shake off the feeling, but it kept coming back, vague and nagging. Finally, as he pulled on a pair of black pants and a white T-shirt, he managed to pin the feeling down at least, even if he didn't remember any of the details of the dream: It was a feeling that he had just barely avoided missing something important—or perhaps just barely missed it after all.

The feeling, once caught and identified, faded away, and as Grantaire made himself breakfast his thoughts were occupied with the latest equipment failures at work (a disadvantage of working for an indie coffee shop, at least in the case of this particular cafe, was that atmosphere seemed to matter more to the owners than keeping the frappe machine in working order) and what he and his shiftmate would have to do in order to work around them. He sat down on the couch with a bowl of homemade granola and fresh peaches and flipped on the TV.

It was another news report about the student protests, which had been going on for a few weeks now. The grievances were the same old things—the austerity measures that some were saying were the economy's only hope and others were saying were killing the last hope of the poor, the war in the Middle East, the injustices toward ethnic and religious minorities. Students had marched and rallied and declaimed in support of causes like these for centuries, and this summer was no different. (You poor fools, part of Grantaire said; you really think this marching and shouting is going to change anything? The rest of him turned its attention quickly to the taste of the early-summer peach, because thinking about the uselessness of the cause was a slippery slope toward thinking of the importance of the cause, and that led to dangerous reminders of how fucked up the world really was.) 

But this report was different. A red box at the upper right-hand corner of the screen read “LIVE” and the newscaster was speaking in a disorganized way that indicated she was off-script. As Grantaire watched, the picture shifted from the newscaster to still photos of riots—angry crowds, smashed windows, police with shields, blood on pavement. Then there were live shots of the aftermath, with charred cars and broken furniture just visible beyond the police barrier; worried-looking people milled about aimlessly nearby, as if hoping for news from a war zone.

“We're just receiving confirmation of the reports that at least ten students were killed in last night's riots,” the newscaster said, and a minute later photos appeared on the screen. They were blurry, cropped from candid photos and school yearbooks: A kid with wild black curls beaming at the camera; a guy with fierce eyes and blonde-white hair; a guy (a girl?) with a long braid over his shoulder and a spray of freckles across his nose. Grantaire was shocked at how young they looked (he kept forgetting that most college students were now at least five years younger than him, and some of them almost ten years younger).

The photos shifted to a new set, and one of them tugged on something inside Grantaire. It was just another awkward candid photo probably harvested from the poor kid's facebook, but there was something familiar about those startling blue eyes. Where had he seen those eyes before?

Then it hit him: Bahorel.

He'd met the guy in the bar a couple months before, and they had spent a few evenings drinking together. Bahorel was big and loud and friendly, and he was fun to hang out with. He'd also clearly been interested in something more than just hanging out—but he wasn't Grantaire's type, so nothing had come of it. They said hey when they ran into each other in the bar, and that was it. He'd had no idea the guy was into this kind of political stuff.

He'd drunk with Bahorel and laughed and considered—however briefly—going out with him, and now there he was on the TV screen, because he was dead. It was strange to think of his body out there, lying cold and empty in the city morgue or wherever they took the corpses of kids who had died in semi-illegal (and pointless) protests. The picture the news network had gotten of him must have been an old one, because he looked younger in it than when Grantaire had known him, and it was difficult not to imagine him younger, when he imagined his death—because how could he not? Last night, while he'd been in his bed sleeping, this guy who he'd almost been friends with had been out in the streets, caught up in a nightmare of a screaming, irrational mob. And then—a slip on a wet newspaper? An incautious blow from a police club? A shot fired in panic? However it had happened, the guy was dead now, and the world would agonize over his death and those of his friends for a couple days and then forget all about him. The poor idiot.

And it hit Grantaire then that things so easily could have been different. What if he had decided that Bahorel was his type after all? What if they'd become friends? It could've been Grantaire out there in the gray of the morning, waiting anxiously by the police barrier for a glimpse of a big, muscular body with cropped brown hair. It could've been Grantaire's photo on the TV.

A shiver ran down his spine and he flipped to another chanel. He watched some program about cheetahs or leopards or something like that, he honestly he wasn't paying much attention, while he finished the rest of his granola. Then it was time to get to work and it was like the first few months of this new way of living; he was looking forward to a busy day of complicated drinks and demanding customers and machines that had to be treated just so in order to work, because all the bustle made a good distraction.

Part of him felt guilty for brushing off a death this way, even if he had only spoken with the guy for a few hours; you were supposed to be sober and thoughtful when confronted with human mortality. But he knew too well what sober and thoughtful did to him, and he had fought too hard for the ground he had gained to risk it all out of misguided respect for someone who was to dead to care what Grantaire did. Someone was dead, and it could have been Grantaire, but it wasn't (someday it would be, but not today), and he was lucky for that. That was all.

Grantaire locked the apartment door behind him and headed off to work, feeling that he had just barely missed something really bad—and wondering why that feeling weighed on him so heavily.


End file.
